The Romans were a group of people who lived a long time ago and had a funny way of keeping count. They also had a penchant for crucifixion. Crucifixion was the best idea at the time for making people suffer and die. If you did it right, crucifixion could take four days to die from. Roman soldiers used to stab people who were already suffocating on the cross because it hurried things along. You see, a Roman soldier couldn’t go anywhere until the misery finally ended. Imagine stabbing someone because you had better places to be! The Romans crucified a lot of people, including a man named Jesus. Jesus was stabbed, too, because someone had something better to do. People would make a big deal out of that one crucifixion.

The Romans also crucified dogs. Yes, dogs. Another group of people, called the Gauls, snuck in and ransacked Rome because they didn’t especially want to be Romans. To enter unannounced, the Gauls fed the starving guard dogs outside the Roman walls. In return, the dogs didn’t bark. The people with the funny numbers never let dogs live it down. Every year, in ceremony, dogs were nailed to dog-sized crosses and paraded through the streets.

Supplicia canum. Punishment of the dogs.

I’m universally against crucifixion. No one should be nailed to planks of wood. If I could fit into a swimsuit, I would tell America that I’m against crucifixion. We had our modern selves a convention in Geneva where we drew lines between miseries like that. The Romans didn’t have a Geneva convention.

But let’s be honest, that man Jesus was a rabble rouser. He had funny ideas about God. For one, he thought he was God. The dogs just wanted to eat. Jesus promised to return. Dogs never left. Jesus promised love. Dogs give love unconditionally.

Now, people sit in big buildings with pointy roofs and pray to that man Jesus. That’s ok if that’s how they want to spend their Sundays and they don’t get too crazy over it. But dogs humbly sit next to us and watch patiently as we type into glowing rectangles. We’ve played make-believe with their genetics and still, dogs keep our beds warm and our pillows soggy.

When Dylan went electric, the world turned against him. I love hearing what that was like from the inside. If you’ve ever felt like you’d been pursuing a new creative path and the world was ignoring you or against you, this is a must watch.

Anthony Bourdain purportedly died today. A suicide. He was a man of vices and demons, worn proudly and used (mostly) productively.

I don’t believe there’s anything after death, but Bourdain took his last epic voyage into that unknown space today. If there is a place beyond, he’s soaking it in, listening to the locals, and following his stomach to its lesser trod corners.

It’s quaint to call him an inspiration. He was a fantasy. At times both viscerally human and mythical, we could overlay our own hopes for a wider lived experience upon him. I’ll miss his cantankerous voice. Most of all though, he threaded the needle between solipsist and collectivist sherpa in a way no one else could. He was the object and the lens. It was always beautiful.

Writing is taking an enormous bowl of cooked spaghetti, untangling the noodles one at a time, meticulously placing them end to end, and returning them to their uncooked state so the reader can do that for themselves.

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.

But teams very rarely ever think about HOW they decide. Startups generally start with consensus and either keep relying on it as they scale which slows them down OR they fall back on a single leader who, as the company grows, becomes less and less equipped to see all aspects of the business.